Your Friendly Neighborhood Banker - And Mr Whipple, Your Neighborhood Grocer

 

I wanted to tell him – that that is a weird way to dress Mr. Businessman – dark blue wide pin-stripe suit and ochre colored Italian shoes, and I can’t even see the cut of your shirt or whether your tie is made of silk. You have your leather traveling businessman’s accoutrements – black leather carrying case,  black leather appointment book, and black laptop. You are logging on to your computer, I see. You sit with your back to me hunched over with your close cropped, but natty trimmed hair – it has everything to do with status – you are an alpha dog, is that not right,  Mr. Businessman. I know this by the way you address your associate. This is the way financial derivitive traders might dress. This is the way a Mafia hit man men once may have dressed. This is the way bank executives want to to dress. This is the image of money making.

Postmodern warfare… has many of the characteristics of what economist call post-Fordist production – Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri – Multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire, 2004  p40

The weather is mild today – our first winter storm is due in a week – it is supposed to start getting colder this afternoon – it will be cold through the week, then warmer on Saturday when the temperature is predicted to reach into the fifties

An inspired writer, in full impetuousness of passion, may speak wisely and true of “raging waves or the sea foaming out their own shame”; but it is only the basest writer who cannot speak of the sea without talking of “raging waves”, “remorseless flood”, “ravenous billows”, etc – John Ruskin – The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from his writings, 1963 p69

Enough is never enough unless it was more than enough to begin with

Meaning is not a something – not an object, not an image, not a set of rules – not anything that can be stored… Yet meaning is not nothing either – Laurence Goldstein – Clear and Queer Thinking, 199 p43

I’m a sleep and I feel something tug at my bedding. I ignore it. Suddenly the bedding is yanked off of me. I jump up – the side of the tent has been torn away. I pull on my bedroll – a bear cub has his teeth in it and is tussling with it – next to him is his mama and she has stuck her head into tent too and her teeth are bared. She is glaring at me.  I remember what I read about what to do in case of an encounter with a bear. I should shout, but that was difficult. I finally managed to do so and immediately woke up. The bear now has her face in mine but it is only the little dog licking me. Time to get up.

It is not my brain that thinks, I can say what it is that I think. It would be absurd to say, my brain is thinking it over, but I don’t know what conclusion it has reached – PMS Hackers – Wittgenstein, Meaning and Mind, 1990

To be immortal is to not

            Experience, for it is that

            That makes one grow old

To experience and posses memory

            Can only make one

            Wish for there to be an end

The immortal will curse his fate

            For eternity while we do

            So only during this limited engagement

Here

The consternation among readers who couldn’t stand to ride on a novel without a plot track was at least as great as had been the consternation among viewers who refused to look at a painting unless they could find a picture – Warren Tallman – New American Story, 1965

The things that exist only through

            A discourse on themselves

And the things that are dangerous

            Because they are capable

                        Of murder

And then there is everything else

Separation is made painful by jealousy, but impossible by gratitude – Marcel Proust – The Captive

Being a fool may bring you happiness, but being stupid does not – it makes you oblivious – after all, that is what stupefying means

I felt that Life and the world, whose fruits I had never really tasted, were passing me by, bartered for a woman in whom I could no longer find anything new – Marcel Proust – The Captive